One bachelor party, two dive bars, and all the boundless possibilities of life in a failing industrial town.

The old man's bar was called the Taj Mahal because one of the ancient brothers who owned the place was something of a world traveler and had decorated the interior with photographs of himself in European capitals and on African safari and shaking hands with Pygmies and whatnot. He'd spent his life visiting ruins, which was good training for operating a tavern in downtown Akron, Ohio, as the eighties drained down. Off to one end of the bar, displayed on a table, was a large model of the actual Taj Mahal, complete with a moat that was stocked with goldfish. This was unfortunate for many reasons, but mainly because the Taj Mahal was directly across the street from the Mayflower Hotel, which had once offered the finest lodgings in town, but now was a subsidized flophouse for drunks and crazies. You don't really want goldfish swimming in open waters surrounded by people carrying glasses of alcohol, especially when you know that some of them will get the shakes before the night is through.

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This was the bar where we chose to celebrate John Puglia's "bachelor party," such as it was. No strippers, no tequila shots, no wild night in Vegas with a bunch of friends. John was getting married in a week, and the two of us wanted to go somewhere authentic, which notion was important to us—him studying art and me studying creative writing—even if we would never say such a thing publicly. Authenticity is something all young men crave, which is why we sometimes wear fedoras and restore cranky British motorcycles and listen to Frank Sinatra and why suspenders occasionally come back into fashion.

We'd grown up in a no-man's-land between two eras: the first, one of microdefined parochialism, and the second, one of amorphous mass culture. John and I were part of the first generation that didn't directly associate all of our defining local institutions with a corresponding local founding figure. The daily newspaper, the Akron Beacon Journal, founded by Charles L. Knight and groomed through the twentieth century by his son John S. Knight, had become the cornerstone of the powerful Knight Ridder newspaper chain. But while his surname was also part of a national brand, Knight, the larger-than-life man who also walked among us, had died in 1981. The major American tire companies—Goodyear, Firestone, B. F. Goodrich, and General—each had its world headquarters here, and each had scores of former workers who remembered shaking hands with the founders and figureheads. My dad always loved to tell the story about having a drink with Jerry O'Neil, the CEO and son of the founder of General Tire. But those men were gone, and while their names were on street signs and school buildings and hospitals, we had no direct connection to the humans who'd borne them.

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Instead, we'd grown up with a strong sense of branding as massive, yet impersonal. Pepsi, for instance, was everywhere, and it was the same everywhere, but there was no sense of its personal mythology, its creator, its connection to any human endeavor other than consumption. It was no mistake that John had named his rock band the Generics. The arrival of generic products in our grocery stores had been a defining moment in our childhoods. Our dads proudly drank beer from a white can with black lettering that said BEER.

And this homogeneity carried all the way across the culture. National chain stores and restaurants were proliferating, with an ever-growing sense of sameness, such that one could enter a Cracker Barrel or a Waldenbooks in any city in the country and feel immediately oriented, with everything where it was supposed to be, looking the way it was supposed to look. The idea of exploration and discovery was being replaced with comfort and familiarity. It was becoming impossible to get lost, which is where the imagination thrives. Yet, even though we always knew where we were, we had a nagging sense of disorientation. If the Waldenbooks self-help aisle in Denver was identical to the one in Milwaukee and identical to the one in Jacksonville, then the idea of being somewhere was more like being anywhere, which is uncomfortably close to the idea of being nowhere, or of where being an irrelevant notion altogether.

So John and I weren't directly defined by our place, not the way our parents had been. And we couldn't be defined by what was replacing it because that was impossible. We were watching all of the old institutions that had given our city its personality be replaced by boxes containing TGI Fridays and Super Kmart—things that defined everybody's life the same way, which means they didn't define anyone's in any particular way.

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Gold Circle had gone under, and although it was a chain, it was regional; it was close to home, and so it had some connection to my sense of place. I liked when I went to another state and realized they didn't have a Gold Circle there, that it was somehow more mine because it wasn't theirs. Other places had their own version of this—Piggly Wiggly or Big Bear. In a similar spirit, I was particularly fond of obscure rock bands because when I found someone else who was a fan of, say, Hüsker Dü or Bush Tetras, it created a bond. (Unfortunately, this sometimes devolved into the inevitable affliction of choosing obscure things solely for the sake of their obscurity, the effect of which was a record collection with a considerable percentage of terrible music. But still.)

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So John and I had taken to exploring our downtown, a place almost nobody went, with some sense of purpose and even maybe urgency. Main Street seemed increasingly intimate because it belonged to increasingly fewer people and increasingly fewer people belonged to it. The act of consciously choosing it as ours seemed like a membership.

Then again, an inventory of the Taj Mahal's clientele suggested that maybe this was not such a hard (or desirable) association to crack. Many of the patrons were entirely defined by their deficiencies, in the way the characters of a formula detective novel are defined by their singular traits, and not just defined, but named: Toothless, One-Leg, Lumpy. They wore their drunkenness like hundred-pound cloaks. It covered them completely and bent them down. Half of them were socially withdrawn in ways that made newcomers uncomfortable; the other half were socially outgoing to the same effect.

Again, this was where we went to celebrate John's last night as a bachelor.

*

The man started a conversation with John. His name was Bob. He spoke in an affectedly elegant voice, the kind that takes dictation from a thesaurus. In the way that Hollywood used to attach an English accent to anyone sophisticated, regardless of nationality (Ashley Wilkes, Nazi officers, Roman senators, etc.), Bob seemed to have taken the continental route to his barstool at the Taj Mahal.

"What do you know of beauty?" he asked, first looking at John, then at me.

I didn't know how to answer the question, and John didn't either, but he was quicker on his feet and better at these games.

"What do you know of beauty?" John responded with a sideways laugh, turning the question back to the old man. John was always best as a catalyst.

Sitting next to Bob was a friend of his, a short, sturdy man with thick gray hair, neatly combed, and an elaborately waxed mustache. His name was Jerry and we knew him mainly for his public presence trolling the sidewalks wearing a sandwich board for one of the few downtown restaurants, which he did in return for being allowed to display his paintings there. He wore a suit with wide lapels, no tie, the collar of his shirt overlapping his jacket. Everything was just so. He smelled strongly of soap, which for some reason never makes a person smell clean.

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He lived in the Mayflower. He said he had a studio there, and the way he said the word studio suggested he took the work he did there seriously, with a little extra emphasis on the u syllable.

"I have one piece that I painted," he told me. "It's a boy, and a dog. Both of them are on the grass, with their bellies down on the ground, staring, face-to-face. They're tugging on a piece of rope. The boy's holding it in his hand; the dog has it in his teeth. And they're facing off. It is not a sentimental piece. It is realism. I call it Best Friend. The title is ambiguous. Is the boy the dog's best friend?"

"Or"—brief dramatic pause—"is the dog the boy's best friend?"

The Jerry I knew in the daytime—the downtown I knew in the daytime—held for me the same allure as, say, the music of Tom Waits and the notion of firing a Winchester: an exotic mystique that seemed directly American, slightly distant and illuminated, something directly of who and what I was, but also something "other," something John and I both wanted to understand. Jerry in the nighttime, however, was a bit close for comfort, and I suppose by extension implied that maybe Tom Waits was just an excellent trickster and that I'd look foolish absorbing the kick of an anachronistic firearm. I didn't know how to maintain my end of this conversation and drifted back toward John's.

Bob was still talking about beauty, becoming more specific, talking about a woman's beauty and then a woman's flesh and then a woman's pink flesh. When he took a drink, he held it in his mouth for a while, not so much as if he were savoring, but as though in some brief indecision about swallowing it, although the only other option would be to spit it out, and I seriously doubt anyone in the Taj Mahal ever spit liquor out on purpose.

"These people here, these are poor people," he said. "Not poor in money. I don't mean that. But poor in beauty. They have not been given the opportunities that we have had to see the beauty of the world. So they are poor. But it's not their fault."

I wondered what it meant to put on a suit to go to a bar like this, not a business suit or a funeral suit, but what Bob might call a "suit of clothes," something to complete a man. Bob came across as the fading shadow of an Esquire man, of the Norman Mailer Esquire. His Wild Turkey was Glenlivet; his polyester was vicuña. I was wearing an untucked oxford shirt, which simultaneously made me feel conspicuously overdressed, like a college boy misplaced in an old man's bar (which I was), and also, in the shadow of Bob, underdressed. Either way, I didn't fit.

But John did. Because John knew how to listen and he knew how to banter. He worked part-time in a rubber factory. This was a good way to understand how to talk to people because the conversation on the shop floors never stopped. Not ever. That was how those guys got through eight hours of dirty, monotonous work: by talking over (or against, really) the machinery. I was listening to Jerry, but I think I was just a convenient replacement for his usual audience of half-conscious drunkards. John, however, was having an actual conversation with Bob. They were getting somewhere.

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"Do you know what snooker is?"

John and I looked at Bob. I thought it might be some kind of profane euphemism, but I wasn't sure.

"No," we both said.

Snooker is a game like pool, Bob told us, but stressed that it was a "gentleman's game." He mentioned Sir Neville Chamberlain and again the notion of gentlemanliness, noting that we, all of us in this group, were gentlemen, and that we should play snooker.

The accuracy of this notion of the four of us as "gentlemen" aside, the Taj Mahal didn't have a pool table. Before anyone had a chance to make this observation, Bob had risen from his chair, slid a few bills onto the bar, smoothed the front of his blazer, and turned toward the door, pausing to indicate we should follow.

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I looked at John. He looked at me. I knew he wanted to go along. I wanted to want to go along too, but something was beginning not to feel right. The more Bob and Jerry drank, the more red and watery their eyes became, and the more slurry their speech. Whatever distinction they made between themselves and the rest of the Mayflower/Taj Mahal community seemed to be eroding. Jerry had continued to regale me with stories of his life in art, and to make random references to the likes of Degas and Miró and Monet, whom he called a hack. He talked a lot about technique, about using charcoals to capture the darkness of the human condition and so forth, but it was all beginning to sound like things he'd heard or read somewhere, and not like something he understood from his own experience.

Nevertheless, we all got up, paid, and headed toward the door, following Bob.

"To the Met Lounge," he said.

The Met Lounge was almost directly across Main Street, another low-rent tavern that was a holdover from what people were beginning to call the "old days," which actually had not been long before, when the Akron day was regulated by three factory-shift changes, which, in turn, represented three drinking shifts. As the prevailing culture had disintegrated, the falling of its pieces into new hands was clunky and random. Some places, such as the Bank, had been readapted in a low-rent sort of way before being abandoned again. Others were still running down the last revolutions of their decline, and this described the Met, which was basically the Taj Mahal without the charm or the moat but with a pool table. A story about the Met made the rounds, about how two frat boys happened in one night to find the place empty except for the barmaid, who'd fallen asleep sitting on her stool, chin propped against the heel of her hand. They decided to steal the Ms. Pac-Man machine. They unplugged it and began to carry it out the back door, but got stuck halfway through, and the struggle to get it free woke the barmaid and foiled the plot.

The four of us got ourselves situated at the pool table with fresh drinks, and Bob began to enlighten us on the game of snooker, which didn't sound any different to me from pool. I couldn't quite follow his instructions, so when we began, I just tried to hit the balls toward the pockets, and since I was a terrible pool player, I missed right away and nobody knew if I understood the rules or not.

This went on for a while, but as it did, Bob began to lose what remained of his elegance; his eyes reddened and he started to call John "my boy," and by about the third use of the phrase it sounded like a cruelty and then he had John in a headlock.

I had never been in a bar fight and I definitely did not want to start this way, with a drunk, old man, but John's face was deeply flushed and alarm was in his eyes, his head twisted sideways, hair askew. Bob appeared to be applying as much force as he could, and John arched his back and twisted his shoulders, trying to break free. Jerry had taken a seat at the bar and seemed not to recognize what was happening, and I was wishing I could do the same.

What was the protocol here? Can you punch someone old enough to be your grandfather? Can you bark out a command to him? Is he the responsibility of his friend? Do you ask the bartender for advice?

John, I think, had been working through the same moral dilemma, albeit to a more urgent degree. He was younger and stronger, but it took what seemed an eternity—in reality, maybe half a minute—for physical instinct to take over. Finally, his face now deep red, he grabbed Bob's forearm with both hands and pried the choke hold loose, yanking his head free and holding Bob at arm's length while he ran the fingers of his other hand against his neck.

"Je-sus," he said, half-trying to laugh but mostly incredulous.

"That's how you play snooker," Bob said, his diction all raw and broken free of its aristocratic restraint. "My boy."

John and I quickly downed our drinks and left.

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*

John S. Knight's newspaper the Akron Beacon Journalwas housed in a stately art deco building, solid and imposing. It had that steadying effect that good institutions have. But most people didn't acknowledge the building for its lower architecture. They knew it for the giant, gaudy, rotating digital clock mounted on its top, one of the most prominent features of the downtown landscape.

The building dated to 1930, and the clock was added in the 1960s. This gangly, rotating rectangular spire, twenty-six feet tall, was turquoise, with the time and temperature flashing on two opposing panels and the huge, illuminated red plastic initials of the newspaper on the other two panels. So the local newspaper's defining symbol was a giant shaft thrusting into the sky, advertising BJ all night in bright red lights.

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John and I called this "our" clock. This is how downtown was then. It was all personal. Your timepiece was a gleaming tower five stories above the street. You owned empty hotels and banks and canals and city streets. They were exclusively ours because they had lost their exclusivity. In many ways, within the central city, we felt like the luckiest generation ever to have lived here. Everything was left to us and was ours to reinvent. When we left the Met Lounge, the BJ clock told us it was still early. We would have enough time to go over to the factory.

Downtown's main street, which with very industrial and midwestern purpose was called Main Street, covered exactly one mile through the business district, which was by then characterized by grimy windows blanked out by yellowing newspapers, taped there by forlorn landlords. Storefronts were littered with the remnants of the last claims whose stakes had been removed. A mannequin's arm. A lady's hat. Discontinued greeting cards. The city, desperate to attract tenants, had attempted an incentive campaign with a Monopoly theme, so now these windows also included faded, water-stained posters mimicking a game board, with a monocled cartoon aristocrat imploring anyone who might pass by to pick up property cheap. Land on Main Street. Collect $200.

This stretch of the central city made an Oz-like transition into the vast, sprawling, mostly abandoned campus of the B. F. Goodrich company, a science-fiction back lot, and that's where John and I were headed, lit by the glow of our clock and the random greasy-yellow lights of cockeyed upstairs windows.

Goodrich was the first tire company in Akron, the one that had set into motion the uncanny growth of the industry and the city, from a canal town that produced clay products—sewer pipes and marbles and teacups and glazed figurines—to a place that was entirely defined by things made of rubber. Akron became known as the Rubber City and had a Wonka-like fantasy to it all, as latex was poured into great vats, mixed with powdered carbon black, and came out as tires and belts and hoses and shoe soles and rafts and balloons and baby dolls and blimps. In the heyday, a street in Akron was paved with rubber, and people here, growing more confident in their own possibility, believed this would further prove the absolute worthiness of the city and its product:

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Soon every town in America would pave its roads with rubber!

Unfortunately, the experiment fizzled. When the rubber road was examined after a decade of use, engineers determined that the surface fared about as well as regular asphalt, which cost three times less than the rubber paving material.

Akron, meanwhile, became defined by dense neighborhoods extending from the factories, populated by people who branded themselves variously as "Goodyear families" or "Firestone families" or "Goodrich families" or "Mohawk families," and so on.

But nowhere was the cityscape more fantastical than in the acres and acres of the Goodrich complex. As the company grew, Goodrich developed a renaissance flair, taking on contracts that expanded its personality by tangents and exponents. The company would get a contract to make shoes and would build a little brick factory on the grounds specifically for shoes. There was a facility for rubber bands, another for golf balls, one for automotive hoses, and so on. In the 1960s, Goodrich landed a government contract to make space suits and hired local seamstresses to sew the space-age fabric into uniforms for Project Mercury astronauts, turning them into otherworldly Rosie the Riveters.

In Akron, they made the suit John Glenn was wearing when he became the first American to orbit the earth. So the campus grew into a dense, haphazard maze of forty-five brick buildings in all sizes and shapes, from the hulking, six-story tire factory at its leading edge to single-room shops tucked here and there, to an ornate headquarters with a fanciful clock set into a bridge between two office towers. The industrial village was intercut with streets and alleys, crisscrossed with pedestrian bridges and walkways, and—maybe, or so John and I had heard—connected underground by a complex network of mysterious tunnels.

Now it was dark and empty. The headquarters had moved out toward the suburbs, and only a fraction of the local workforce remained—about fourteen hundred people, most of whom would be laid off within the next couple of years. Goodrich had begun something it called Operation Greengrass—a plan to raze the entire complex and plant grass seed. Soon it would be gone.

We slipped around a brick corner into the black shadows and found a barrel to boost us up to a ladder and then we began to climb. It didn't take long to find an opening to one of the main factory buildings. We each swung our legs over a sill and stepped down onto a concrete floor, glass and debris crunching under our feet. There was a complex sound of fluttering and scurrying, and the dripping of sourceless water.

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It was less dark inside than I'd expected with the accumulated light of all those windows, half of them broken, the other half grimy, a kind of dingy glow, mostly from the moon.

"Jesus," John said. "It's big."

We'd both poked around down here, a lot, but I had never been inside one of the main buildings, and even in the dark its solidity and scale was impressive. Despite the decay, the overwhelming sense was of how well built this place was, of its enduring, defining quality.

No machines were left. Akron was filled with men haunted by a particular lament, a story told again and again: the same hands that had worked a machine for years had had to unbolt that machine, dismantle it, and crate it up to be shipped overseas where a cheaper worker would use it. These men were desperate to remake their lives. Through the 1980s, they scraped for any kind of work. Many had simply disappeared, gone south or west or just plain down into their basements. They were telling their children to get out as soon as they were able.

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But much of what John and I loved about Akron was the very argument those fathers were making: the abandoned landscape, the hard challenge, the long odds. We saw the same things but in a very different way, with an absolute belief that something was to be saved here, that lives were to be made, that we could remake all this as our own.

This was the central question of our place, of all places like this, of the entire industrial Midwest, the Rust Belt, a question teetering on this very moment:

Is it something beyond salvation, or something to be saved? And what exactly is "it"?

Not long before, a columnist from the Beacon Journal had gone down Main Street, counting empty storefronts. In that stretch of a mile, he found fifty-two of them, businesses that had gone under. John and I calculated that as fifty-two places we could get cheap. We would start a magazine, make documentaries, build a sculpture garden.

It was all possibility.

Concrete pillars, fluted at each end, stretched from floor to ceiling, covered with graffiti: jagged letters and swirls of paint and tagger signatures layered one over the next. It was hard to make out the details, but some of it was elaborate. Murals covered some of the walls.

John followed the lure of one of these paintings, walking into the shadows for a closer look. It was creepy enough in there that I wanted to stay close and I moved to catch up with him. And that's when I saw it, all at once, opening in the dark like a phantom.

"John!" I screamed. "Stop!"

He froze and turned back to look at me. "What?"

"Stop!"

"What?"

"Look in front of you."

There, one step ahead: an open elevator shaft.

We continued, much more carefully, making our way up stairwells, lost in the exploration. In the dark, we found hints of people's lives. A glove, a stack of work orders. Someone had written a message on a door:

ALL GONE

NO WORK

We found a staircase and made our way up, one turn, then the next and the next until we found a door that opened to the roof and then there we were, high up in the air, stepping out to the sky. We strode across the rubber roof as though it were a small frontier and leaned our elbows atop the parapet to see the glittering lights of the city that had all grown from here, this very spot. More than a hundred years before, the entire identity, the entire future, the entire legacy, of our city had begun on this very corner, when Benjamin Franklin Goodrich, an entrepreneurial New Yorker, had chosen Akron over all his other options.

We looked out into the night. The air was cool. The lights stretched farther than I expected. Forever, in every direction.

David Giffels is an assistant professor of English at the University of Akron, and a former columnist at the Akron Beacon Journal. He is the author of All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House, the coauthor, of Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!, and Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron.